Think film retrospectives, and the mind either conjures showcases dedicated to directors or actors - who, inevitably, are the more high-profile group in the industry.
And it's this simplistic knowledge that the Hong Kong Film Archive's latest programme, Capturing Light and Shadow, seeks to correct. The showcase, which began yesterday and will run until September 26, shines a light on cinematographers Ho Look-ying and Bill Wong Chung-biu.
Their names will probably be lost to most cinema-goers, but some of the films they have helped bring to fruition are now considered landmarks in Hong Kong cinema. Ho, who worked the cameras for more than 150 films from the 1930s to the early 80s, was responsible for the images that defined Tong Tik-sang's Mysterious Murder diptych (1951) and Lee Han-hsiang's The Enchanting Shadow (1960). Wong has had a hand in quite a few films now seen as critical touchstones of new Hong Kong cinema in the 80s, including Ann Hui On-wah's The Story of Woo Viet (1981), Patrick Tam Ka-ming's Nomad (1982), Tsui Hark's Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's Rouge (1988).
'Just like most Western cinematographers, Hong Kong's also tend to be undersung heroes, if not unsung ones,' says the archive's programmer Sam Ho See-wing. 'Usually the attention is on the stars first, and then the filmmakers ... but we should cast our nets wider and look at other tenets of the process of filmmaking.'
Ho says the two cameramen had different ways of working. Ho Look-ying, he says, possessed a stronger personal style than Wong. 'His work was very much influenced by film noir. He likes to play with darkness, and his work is more expressionistic.' Ho, who was born in Hangzhou in 1913, joined Shanghai's Mingxing Film Company as a 19-year-old apprentice, before moving to Hong Kong after the second world war.
His style is vividly illustrated in some of his films chosen for the programme. In Mysterious Murder, the deadly intrigue in a faction-ridden clan is heightened by Ho's play with pallid backdrops and menacing shadows. Lee Sun-fung's Bloodstained Azaleas, in which a rich woman attempts to corrupt a virtuous young man, is given an even more menacing sheen by Ho's atmospheric camerawork. In The Dream Encounter Between Emperor Wu of Han and Lady Wai, Ho's stylings were crucial in allowing director Tong Tik-sang to adapt his own Cantonese opera piece into a bleak psychological drama on film.
